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Stupidest career "progressives" on the face of the earth

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I may be critical of Obama as any Left Independent, but Riverdaughter's obsession of refighting the 2008 Democratic primary and sanctioning Hillary Clinton as the "One True Progressive Feminist who got robbed" is wearing just a bit thin now.

Hillary Clinton was then and is now as much a corporatist Democrat as Obama is; she would have not changed a thing fundamentally if she had won the Presidency. And, in fact, it's not necessaily a safe bet that she would have beaten McCain, especially if instead of going with Sarah Palin, McCain had gone with a more sensible choice for VP like, say, Mitt Romney.

That she is getting smeared by the usual right-wing whackjobs and reacting with the strength she has shown as SoS is to her credit, but that doesn't change the basic fact that she's a pillar of the establishment. But, I suppose that RD just can't get 2008 out of her head enough.

Besides, if Hillary wants it, she's the overwhelming favorite to lap the field in 2016, anyway...and Obama won't be around for her and her sister PUMA's to kick around anymore.

the 2008 primary is critical is because it revealed Obama's misogyny, his sense of entitlement. The disenfranchisement of the entire states of Michigan and Florida was reminiscent of Bush vs Gore, and clearly indicated Obama's view that there are no rules he need take notice of. It was also a clear indication that not just Obama, but Reid, Schumer, all of them regard voters as stepping stones, whose desires can be swept away. We should never forget what happened.

The idea that It really didn’t mater which Democratic candidate won in 2008 is one I’ve never subscribed to. I believe the weakest, least liberal candidate was nominated and it was a Banker’s coup d’etat. Call me a wooden headed conspiracist, oh wait, you already have.
2008 one Candidate’s plea::

There is a broad consensus that Congress must act to stave off deeper turmoil on Wall Street. Irrespective of the final agreement yet to be reached, there are several principles that must be part of a broader reform effort that begins this week and continues in the coming months.

This is not just a financial crisis; it’s an economic crisis. Therefore, the solutions we pursue cannot simply stabilize the markets. We must also deal with the interconnected economic challenges that set the stage for this crisis — and reverse the failed policies that allowed a potential crisis to become a real one.

First, we must address the skyrocketing rates of mortgage defaults and foreclosures that have buffeted the economy and ignited the credit crisis. Two million homeowners carry mortgages worth more than their homes. They hold $3 trillion in mortgage debt. Nearly three million adjustable-rate mortgages are scheduled for a rate increase in the next two years.

Another wave of foreclosures looms.

I’ve proposed a new Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), to launch a national effort to help homeowners refinance their mortgages. The original HOLC, launched in 1933, bought mortgages from failed banks and modified the terms so families could make affordable payments while keeping their homes. The original HOLC returned a profit to the Treasury and saved one million homes. We can save roughly three times that many today. We should also put in place a temporary moratorium on foreclosures and freeze rate hikes in adjustable-rate mortgages. We’ve got to stem the tide of failing mortgages and give the markets time to recover.

The time for ideological, partisan arguments against these actions is over. For years, the calls to provide borrowers an affordable opportunity to avoid foreclosure as a means of preventing wider turmoil were dismissed as government intrusion into the private marketplace. My proposals over the past two years were derided as too much, too soon. Now we are forced to reckon with too little, too late…

SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS) – California had the highest foreclosure rate in the country in July, a stark reminder that people are still losing their homes in record numbers despite state and federal efforts to end the housing crisis…

Partly because it would have prevented a great deal of human suffering in the foreclosure crisis.

However, it also would have ripped the scab off the "chain of title" issues that still plague the housing industry, because in order for the houses to have entered the program, the chain of title would have had to be clean. At any kind of scale at all, and HOLC would have been a very big program, the robosigning, the records falsification, the fees rip-offs, all would have become clear, and the Flying Fickle Finger of Fate pointed right at the bankster CEOs and their accounting control frauds.

First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win. -- Mahatma Gandhi

"Hillary Clinton was then and is now as much a corporatist Democrat as Obama is; she would have not changed a thing fundamentally if she had won the Presidency. "

Erm....well if YOU say so Tony.

I kinda have a hard time imagining Clinton doing many of the things Obama did in his first term. Domestically she was better on mortgage relief, health care (would she have signed an executive order limiting women's reproductive rights? or locked out single payer advocates? Or made deals behind closed doors? Can't imagine she would have continued the Bush Tax Cuts, or forced the creation of a Cat Food Commission)
Come to think of it - you sure you're not just BTD in disguise slummin' over here?

I didn't expect "fundamental" from Clinton. That doesn't' mean that, if you accept the legacy party frame, that she wasn't the better option. But I no longer accept that frame, primarily because of my experience in 2008.

First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win. -- Mahatma Gandhi

Anthony J Kenn is correct. You don't get to be in the top ranks of the Democratic party without being a corporatist and a neocon. If Gore or H. Clinton had been elected, their Presidencies would have differed in their atmospherics from Obama's and Bush's but the substance, an expansion and consolidation of the kleptocracy would have been much the same. This is completely unsurprising since both were heavily involved in that most corporatist of Presidents Bill Clinton, whose Treasury Sectaries were Rubin and Summers, who repealed Glass-Steagall and deregulated derivatives, and under whom wealth inequality grew faster than under Bush or Reagan. Stop this Democratic Derangement Syndrome now. Stop looking for heroes among those who are looting you.

First, there is no way to prove your assertions that Gore and H Clinton would have been no different. Second it's a fallacy to assume that because some policy might be the same, then EVERYTHING would be the same. (Al Gore's policies on the environment would have been the same as Bush II?) Third, if we're indulging in speculation, let's pretend that BClinton got a third term. If he'd seen the destructive effects of Glass-Steagall, would he have sat impotently by and done nothing about it? I think not.

Finally, it's not Democratic Derangement Syndrome to observe that Democrats are now misogynistic as an institutional framework. That's a change from what used to be the case prior to 2007.

Suggesting that there's no lessons to be learned from the 2008 primary by the Democratic Party is ridiculous. However, it's more than obvious that these lessons have not been learned.

Wasn't his main program for the "environment" to use some kind of "carbon tax credit" scheme? Because if it was, then ditto Bush #2. And I'd have to be aggressively persuaded to believe that Hilary would have anything else to propose in the way of actual "environmental policy." Don't forget, her husband earns mountains of cash providing "consulting" services to certain OPEC countries.

Ron Suskind's newest book. Confidence Men, gives imho a pretty good account of the jockeying for power on Obama's transition team which decided who the administration's economics team would be. Susskind divides them into two groups. Team A included Paul Volcker, Robert Reich, Laura Dyson, Robert Wolf of UBS. Volcker was being considered for SecTreas.

Team B was Robert Rubin, Tim Geithner, Larry Summers, Jason Furman and others. All of them served under Bill Clinton. More accurately, they were Rubin acolytes. Geithner and Summers were the two from this group being considered for SecTreas. According to Suskind, the key person who convinced Obama to select Team B was Summers.

....The partial capture of the Democratic Party by Wall Street and the distorting effect of that capture on policy are central themes of Noam Scheiber’s The Escape Artists: How Obama’s Team Fumbled the Recovery, an inside account of Obama’s economic team from the early days of the presidential transition to late 2011.

Scheiber starts with the influence Wall Street exerted over the assembly of that economic team. In its early stages, Scheiber tells us, Obama’s campaign relied for policy advice on “obscure academics, contrarian gadflies, and past-their-prime bureaucrats,” like Austan Goolsbee, a young economics professor from the University of Chicago, and Paul Volcker, the octogenarian though still vigorous former chairman of the Federal Reserve. But by September 2008, another economic group had formed and begun competing for influence, composed of “well-heeled insiders. Most [of them] had worked for former Clinton Treasury secretary Robert Rubin.” Rubin had been a partner at Goldman Sachs before joining the Clinton administration; after leaving, he became a director and counselor, and then chairman, of Citigroup.

Soon, the latecomers had completely superseded the early team. For example, the person charged with vetting potential economic hires was Jason Furman, a seasoned Washington economist who ran the Hamilton Project, a neoliberal think tank founded by Rubin and funded by Democratic-friendly financiers. Mike Froman, an aide to Rubin during his tenure as treasury secretary who then followed Rubin to Citigroup, was the personnel chief of Obama’s transition team. It was he who put forward Larry Summers and Tim Geithner as the leading candidates for treasury secretary.

Summers, the Harvard economist and former undersecretary of the treasury under Robert Rubin, who then succeeded him as treasury secretary, as well as being an adviser to a Wall Street hedge fund, would become Obama’s top economics aide as director of the National Economic Council. Geithner, who had been Summers’s lieutenant while at the Clinton Treasury and was later chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, had been one of three people who had acted to save the country’s biggest banks—on terms congenial to the banks—during the fall of 2008. As Scheiber writes, “By putting Mike Froman in charge of hiring, Obama was, in effect, choosing to staff his administration with insiders and establishmentarians.”

The dominance of Rubinites in the new administration shocked many progressives, since for many the Clinton-supported repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, advocated by Robert Rubin but opposed by Paul Volcker, symbolized the extent to which the financial crisis of 2008 was hatched in the overly friendly relationship between the Clinton administration and Wall Street.

In my judgement, since we got the economic team we would have had with Hillary, we got pretty much the same economic policies we would have gotten with Hillary.

Not that it matters. When I assessed the top economic advisers of the Obama, Clinton, Edwards, and Kucinich campaigns back in January 2008, in Who will tell Wall Street to shove it?, I wrote:

....The big problem with Obama is the same problem Hillary has: his economic advisers are Democratic versions of "neo-liberal" radical free marketeers, so it is going to be the major intellectual breakthrough of their lives to have to admit that most of what they know and believe about economics is wrong.

Further, I argued that "There is NO solution to these financial and economic crises within the presently accepted economic belief structure of U.S. elites."

Volcker is a good example of how terrible the economic choices are. Presented as the eminence grise of the Democratic Party, who supposedly would be tough enough to put Wall Street in its place, Volcker in fact was one of the people most responsible for steering the US economy into the disasters of financialization and deindustrialization. As UnderSecretary of the Treasury, Volcker played a central role in 1971 in convincing Nixon to wreck the Bretton Woods system of tightly managed exchange rates without putting in place some alternative. This opened up the policy room for wild speculation on forex, which now amounts to over $4 trillion a day. A DAY. Then, as Fed chairman a few years later, Volcker refused to help Chrysler, but helped bail out the banks that nearly went under when the Hunt brothers attempt to corner silver collapsed. This opened up the policy room for the explosion of usury, speculation in interest rates, and confirmed that the financial sector was preferred over the industrial sector.

So having Volcker instead of Geithner is presented to us as the "better option." Fuck The Village!

Also note that Robert Wolf of UBS had given Obama more warning and insight into the financial crash about to happen than anyone else in DC had (including - judging from reports this past week of the just released transcripts of the Federal Reserve meetings at the beginning of the crash - the chairman and governors of the Fed). Which to me means Obama has no grounds for saying that no one knew how severe the crash would be. He damn well knew. He should have known this was his chance to cut Wall Street down to size. He probably did know. His policies choices have damned us all to a decade or more of increasing misery.

The wrong-wing excels at setting up litmus tests for politicians. For example, are they against abortion. Another example is Norquist's no tax pledge. I suggest a few litmus tests of our own:

1. Tax all transactions in the financial markets, including forex.

2. Outlaw hedge funds. Hedge funds were established to allow rich people to "invest" their money differently than anyone else can. This is fundamentally inimical to the concept of all citizens being equal, and undermines basic principles of what it means to be a republic. The favorable legal and tax treatment hedge funds are given also makes it easier for the rich to engage in economic rent seeking behavior.

3. The platinum coin would have been a good litmus test. In its place, let us insist on returning the power to create money to the government, taking that power away from private bankers.

first of all, Bill and Hillary are 2 different people. Her Senate voting record was consistently to the left of Bill's presidency. Secondly, it would never have occurred to Hillary that you could get reelected with unemployment over 7%. Even if she would have had the same team, and I am not so convinced of that, she would have had different priorities. It really does make a difference who is boss.

Hillary's base also skewed more working class and elder than Obama's "creative class" (and former Republican) base. That's why the Clinton campaign's digital device of choice was the throwaway cell phone (to reach people at whichever shit job they had) and not the website.

A base that needs government to work increased the odds that government will work.

First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win. -- Mahatma Gandhi

I agree that the Rubinites would have infested either administration. But all that determines is the parameters of the debate. But that doesn't preclude better outcomes within those parameters.

For example, I doubt very much that in a Hillary Clinton administration, (sexist asshole) Larry Summers would have been able to suppress Christina Romer's high-ball estimate for the amount of the stimulus package. If the stimulus had been higher, a lot of human suffering would have been averted.

First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win. -- Mahatma Gandhi

Thank you Mr. Wikrent. And as you make perfectly clear, it doesn't take Sherlock Holmes [just compare the cast of economic adisers] to figure out that for all intents and purposes (and insofar as the political economy is concerned) Hillary and Obama are/were interchangeable.

Are you serious in believing that the woman who was on Walmart's Board of Directors and who was even at one time a practicing member of the prayer worship group C Street, and who was the main promoter of the "managed care" proposals of Bill Clinton's first term that ultimately evolved into both RomneyCare in Massachusetts and "ObamaCare" nationwide....was suddenly going to morph into FDR if she had won??

Plus....she would have had the same constraints as Obama had: an obstructionist GOP, an hysterical Far Right (just substitute Vince Foster/Mena murder fantasies and "radical feminist lesbian" conspiracies for "Birtherism"), and, of course, the realities of Wall Street dominance of the Democratic Party.

But don't take my word for it....ask Al From, the voice of Third Way-ism and the ideologue of the Democratic Leadership Council, whether he thinks that Hillary would be anything other than a neoliberal corporatist. Remember, before Obama rose up, HRC was the assumed heir apparent to her husband, and the main representative of DLC policies.

The problem, in an nutshell, is bigger than who becomes President. It's the system that is broken. And, the Democratic Party as a whole.

I suggest you go take a look at Hillary's voting record and compare it to Obama's. Or how about her history outside the Senate and the White House. Her commitment to liberal causes is well known. Seems you have some catch up reading to do.

Also, if Hillary was the heir apparent to the DLC, they surely threw their own under the bus with relish in picking Obama to be the candidate.

... who saved capitalism. So I think his class and imperial pedigree bears comparison to Clinton's. Wikipedia (sigh):

While his paternal family had become prosperous early on in New York real estate and trade, much of his immediate family's wealth had been built by FDR's maternal grandfather, Warren Delano, in the China trade, including opium and tea.

Of course, as we all know, New York Real Estate is a veritable fountain of purity.

So I can't imagine why anybody who's minimally aware of history would think that sitting on Walmart's board is necessarily a bar to, say, programs that increase aggregate demand (which helps out Walmart, too). In fact, if you want to save capitalism, as FDR did, that sort of position might be a necessity.

* * *

More seriously, or rather even more seriously, "was suddenly going to morph into FDR if she had won" is pure and simple a gigantic straw man. Please cite to the passage in Riverdaughter's post where she makes that claim. In addition, it's really insulting to Clinton supporters, because it implies that their choices weren't made after thoughtful consideration, and with some hard-headed hope that reform of the Democratic party was possible. (Now I don't think it is, absent a purge of Obama's corrupt apparatchiks; na ga happen).* One might also note, in retrospect, that the critical thinking of Clinton supporters on Obama turned out to be correct, more often than not, except when it wasn't cynical enough.

To recapitulate the claims I made at the time:

1. The differences between Clinton and Obama were marginal but not insiignificant

2. Clinton and Obama were a wash on the empire. (IOW, the claims made for Obama on the basis of his never-recorded Iraq speech were baseless.)

3. On health care, both candidates supported the mandate. However, only Clinton supported the principle of universal care. That would have placed single payer advocates "farther upfield" in the policy battles to come.

In addition, there were two excellent reasons why Clinton supporters "fought the good fight" in 2008 that emerged in the course of the campaign, and both presaged significant aspects of the Obama administration:

5. The truly vile sexism and misogny that the Obama campaign and many many of it's supporters displayed during the campaign**. This alone is a reason to support Clinton, even if all other things are equal, which they are not.

6. The seizure of power through corrupt practices, both through caucus fraud (in the TX primary) and through rules violations in the Rules and Bylaws committee. This is a second reason to support Clinton, even if all the other reasons are a wash.

In short, although with Riverdaughter I think "the shine is off" (paraphrasing) and that in the most important issue -- which didn't really figure in the campaign -- the dominance of the financial sector, "the bad guys won," I am proud to have fought the good fight.

On a personal note, I might add that I have experienced severed friendships and loss of work from Obama supporters, and that this tendency continues to this very day. Not relevant to the points I make above, but does speak to the fact that Clinton supporters were and are serious in their political thinking.

NOTE * I didn't finally break with the legacy party system until July 2008 (IIRC) when Obama, right after his triumphal nomination, flipped on FISA and voted for retroactive immunity for the telcos for their warrantless surveillance program, thereby gutting the Fourth Amendment and the rule of law.

NOTE ** Adding insult to injury, the Obama supporters covered up with disgusting and false smears of racism, not just in the press, but personally, and against many of us, including me. Basically, they irradiated the landscape.

First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win. -- Mahatma Gandhi

One of Basement Angel's last comments at Corrente:
2-18-11:
"Clinton has dedicated her life to improving the living conditions, health conditions and educational opportunities of women around the world with definable results. She ran the first genuinely competitive race for the presidency and had the boys not decided to cheat by disenfranchising voters, would have won the race. But she still knocked down innumerable barriers for the next qualified female candidate. There are no greater feminists heroes around at this time. She stands with the greats and I'm proud that I got to vote for her. Of course, unlike most Americans, I took the time to educate myself and I know what she's actually done with her life. And that's why I take this stand."

... by cheaters, had kicked the table over and said "I'm not playing that game" (the TX caucus fraud people, among them Basement Angel, had plenty of video). In retrospect, it's the same sort of decision that Gore made in his process of accepting the legitimacy of election 2000. I don't know the causes, whether party loyalty, or failure of imagination, or worse motives, but in retrospect the two cases look similar.

First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win. -- Mahatma Gandhi

Speculating about what might have been with politicians strikes me as about as worthless as the electronic media they're written on, so here's mine:

I still don't see much difference between the two. Screw who the bases are - the advisors are the tell. No effective leader appoints advisors to give him advice he doesn't want to make use of. Barack Obama has gotten away with lying to his base, and Hillary Clinton is smart enough to accomplish that feat, too. Heck, all you have to do is blame those nasty, obstructionist Republicans and that filibuster-loving Harry Reid. You'll have plenty of folks to carry that water.

Since by the time I had a chance to vote there were no progressive candidates left, I voted for Clinton over Obama. Not much of a choice there, but Clinton seemed a little more honest and a little more capable of running the government well. And by "a little more honest", I mean she'd say she was thinking about some issue, whereas Obama would just lie about it. Call it a more nuanced approach, if you will. She was definitely better on foreign policy, having let Obama hire the advisors in that realm who'd shown they didn't know what they were doing, but in most other regards I didn't see any difference worth noting.

Would she have been a better President from a progressive perspective? Possibly, but I'm pretty sure that by now I'd have been as fed up with her as I am with Obama.

BTW, I'm not all that impressed with the whole "If Hillary hadn't intended to march the bankers down Wall Street in chains, why did they support Obama?" trope, either. There is at least one alternative explanation, which is that the bankers knew Obama was their man, but they weren't sure about Clinton. Remember the "nuanced approach". It leaves people guessing. If you're looking at jail time if you guess wrong, you go with the sure thing. It could be that simple.

I think I remember you from Hullabaloo. Are you not one "Digby's Disappeared"? Along with Monster from the Id, Sarah B., myself, and others? And who were among Digby's most treasured "must keep" commenters until the very end? Stuff like Graham Firchlis and PieceOfCake and so forth. That says a lot right there.
I wish I had known about Riverdaughter's The Confluence in 2008. I might have benefited from its severely underpublicised information and carefully thought out analyses.
And having a retro-description of DemCon 2008: Grand Theft Nomination and the Road To Denver brings us a very useful insight into the nature of the people who engineered a Bush V. Gore-style nomination outcome for Obama.
I took it for granted that HClinton was a Trojan Horse filled with BClinton advisers, Free Trade Treason Agreements, etc. etc. Imagine my dismay at Obama' revealing himSELF to BE that very Trojan Horse instead. And only lately am I discovering the differences-in-detail between HC's and BO's approaches to particular things and stuff. Mr. Strether points out one such area of difference: HC's HOLC versus ( and I DO mean VERsus) BO's HAMP. And that's a difference which would have MADE a difference.
I think you might benefit from many hours spent very carefully reading and studying a blog called Naked Capitalism. And why not stop by The Confluence and say hello to me and Monster from the Id ( who has a new nom d'keyboard now)?

I am loving how the Hillary Clinton loyalists here are so quick to dismiss me as a Hillary hater and an Obama lover merely because I don't buy into the "Hillary was the only 'progressive' choice in 2008" meme.

For the record, people, I'm not even a Democrat, and the last Democrat that I even voted for for President was Mondale in 1984. I left the party and became a "Left Independent" two years later, in 1986, after a particularly nasty local Congressional election where the Black Democratic nominee for such lost to a Reaganite Republican after all of the establishment Dems essentially abandoned her due to her being "too liberal". Since then, I've voted for Gloria la Riva (Peace and Freedom candidate in 2004), Cynthia McKinney in 2008, and last year I voted for Peta Lindsay. So, please, don't assume that I'm an Obama booster merely because I'm not a Hillary backer.

And actually, I don't really hate Hillary, either, any more than I "love" President Obama. It does seem, though, that the level of vitriol here goes well beyond merely principled criticism of Obama's policies. The fact remains that Hillary's history as both wife of Bill and as a US Senator and Secretary of State, and the policies she has put in place, bely the same kind of neoliberal centrism mixed with dashes of social liberalism that Barack Obama has also representated. Even if she may be a tad more kind to the "working class" (and it's highly suspectable that that was more primary positioning to counter Obama's Black support than anything else), simply assuming that she would have been more able to enact progressive policy than Obama has (or more appropriately, has not) is still simply conjecture. (Oh...and I guess that Black folk who support Obama can't be "working class", too?? Not even the majority of working class Black women??)

I'm as disappointed about Obama tacking center-right as everyone else here is.....but unlike those who still grip about the Michigan Dem primary and how Hillary got hosed there, I'm more concerned about building a grassroots movement on the Left that will transcend the Democrats and attack the Center AND the Right. Getting lost in trivial squabbles about whether Hillary would have passed single payer is not an option....and no, she wouldn't, because her health care plan, however "universal" it might have started, was based on the same "managed care" and forced mandate principles that ultimately gave us RomneyCare and the Big Insura Bailout that is the ACA.

Misogyny directed towards Hillary?? Yes, indeed, there was plenty of it...and in the heat of the primary, I acknowledge that some of the Obama faithful reduced themselves to the bottom of the barrel. Yery uncalled for, yes. But, how about also acknowledging the equally sordid bits of racism heaved towards Obama and his supporters? I mean, how on earth can anyone defend the stuff Geraldine Ferraro was saying? Or, the "Michelle Obama is a WHITEY HATER!!!!!1111ONE11!!!" smears that were being pulled near the end of the campaign. So, basically, I say that both sides gave as much as they got.

Oh...and yes, I've been a contributor to Hullabaloo when they did have comments; and I'm hoping that when Digby and David Atkins get their comments back, I will continue to add my two cents worth about the need for an Independent Left. And for the record, I do also read Naked Capitalism...Yves is a damn good writer, even if some of the things she writes about I disagree with.

I have other real issues with Riverdaughter that are beyond the scope of this topic, and someday I will hash them out in a more suitable venue. For the moment, though, it's her thrashing of Digby for not being so willing to suspend logic and swallow the PUMA Kool-Aid (which, in my opinion, is closer to only slightened sweetened tea), that inflamed me enough to post a comment here. Hillary Clinton may be just a tad to the left of Barack Obama, but in my view, they are still too corporatist and centrist; both need to be held accountable for their policies and actions. But, to each his/her own.

This commenting system named me as Anonymous Coward just a little above, so in case it does so again, I am r u reddy. I have to agree with commenter just above that Anthony_JKenn's reply to my comment was a very word-filled effort to divert us from noticing his refusal to engage with any facts that Mr. Strether or I or others have presented. If this is the quality of leftist thought in general, I suspect that that rightist ethno-populust movements will gain a hundred supporters for every supporter that the leftist movements gain. If a leftist can't even muster the minimal personal integrity needed
to admit how very different HOLC would have been from what HAMP has been, then a leftist has precisely zero thought to offer of any analytical or informational value whatever.
And therefor, said leftist (or indeed any such leftist) is so utterly unworthy of being engaged with that I won't even bother replying to any reply-reply that Mr. JKenn wants to make. He can have the last word, if he wants it.

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